Down Low desperately wants to be funny and push boundaries. You can see it straining from the very beginning, when Cameron (Lukas Gage), a gay and Gen-Z masseur, begins a casual conversation with his client Gary (Zachary Quinto) while giving him a hand job. It’s a promising opening stanza, especially when Cameron keeps distracting Gary with his gum-chewing and music choices. The subsequent visual gag––the full sex act cast in silhouette as the title plays over––makes clear this comedy will show you as much as it possibly can. But why does it already seem so forced?
Maybe because it suggests a knee-jerk reaction to movies like Bros or Love, Simon, recent mainstream gay comedies that spell out the culture for straight audiences. Perhaps as a matter of principle, Down Low cuts hard against the grain of those palatable affairs, aiming for insider language and references that lead to gross-out and taboo scenarios. The inspiration mostly stems from Gage, the movie’s twink-in-command, who co-wrote the script with Pheobe Fisher. He’s desperate to shock, to make you laugh, to generate a coked-up persona full of heart and empty on brains. You see those boring, play-it-safe movies? he effectively asks. That’s not our movie!
That only takes you so far. Gary’s invited Cameron to his palatial home to achieve his first sexual climax with a man. He’s recently out and freshly divorced, remnants of the previous life with his ex-wife (Audra McDonald) and two sons still hovering in a family portrait that hangs over the living room. This new awakening, however, has an attached time limit; Gary has a month to live, thanks to a brain tumor. It’s a depressing reality that Cameron is eager to turn into a revitalization project. Out and proud, he quickly signs up Gary for Plungr (the unimaginative proxy for Grindr) and starts courting men online for a potential threesome. Soon this unlikely duo has a dead body on its hands and a necrophiliac on the way over to clean it up.
In his directorial debut, Rightor Doyle attempts to stretch out the shenanigans and milk this inverted coming-of-age lesson for as long as possible. But even he’s not immune to the genre’s tropes. After a variety of Pretty Woman references, Doyle conceives an unnecessary wardrobe sequence that lands softly as Gary swaps his white Oxford for a blue button-down. Later, after Simon Rex (making good on his Red Rocket afterglow) enters the picture with a crack pipe, there’s a requisite drugged-out dance sequence set to Vincint’s “Higher.” Even as Down Low loses narrative steam it’s the one moment attempting to get to this movie’s thesis and has something to visually expressed. The ecstasy the trio feels in this short-lived high suggests what it feels like to stop hiding and repressing. This is the life Gary should be living. Then it moves onto the next ludicrous problem to solve.
I’m not sure Quinto works in this movie––his straight edge is enough for the initial setup but he stays in a mostly muted zone, even as Gage rattles his cage. It’s a mismatch not even Judith Light, who appears as a drunken neighbor and threatens to expose their deception, can shake up, which is a shame. At some point the rapid-fire jokes, the cruel absurdity, the luxe-location gags (scenes scatter from Gary’s tennis court to his putting green) have to go somewhere, have to crackle and make you care. “Words just kind of fall out of my mouth sometimes” Cameron says near the finale, and it’s how most of this movie feels. Down Low doesn’t know where to end and what to center. It’s eager for a happy ending and forgets the necessary work to produce one.
Down Low premiered at SXSW 2023.